The sight of children wearing ear defenders in school is “insane”, Reform UK’s deputy leader has said, claiming that neurodiverse conditions such as ADHD are being over-diagnosed.
Richard Tice, setting out the progress of Reform’s Doge (department of government efficiency) unit at a press conference in Westminster today, said that if the “crisis” in the special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) system is not resolved, there will be “no bins collected” – referring to the big financial deficits councils are facing in delivering SEND support.
Mr Tice said that there is a “crisis of over-diagnosis of children with neurodiverse issues”.
Asked what Reform can do to tackle this, he said: “The best thing to do, actually, is to push almost all of it back to the schools. The schools know best, the teachers know best.
“And stop labelling people. Just say, ‘You need a bit of extra support; you might need a bit of extra time.’
“You’ve got to the mad situation now where children who don’t have any form of label are starting to feel left out.
“I’ll just raise one more point: the sight of children in classes wearing ear defenders – I’m sorry, this is just insane. It’s got to stop. The teachers want it to stop. Heads want it to stop. It’s not the right way forward.”
Spielman: Dyslexia ‘just means bad at reading’
He also issued this warning at a separate Policy Exchange event today focused on SEND, saying that local authorities would go bust due to unsustainable spending.
At that event, Baroness Spielman, former chief inspector of Ofsted, questioned the use of labels in SEND and claimed that all dyslexia means is “bad at reading”.
She said that giving “labels” could “feel kind” to the pupil and that parents “often find it tremendously reassuring to have a name to put on something”.
This, she said, “is how words like dyslexia came about – all it means is bad at reading”. Likewise, dyscalculia is “putting a fancy label on what people knew already”, she added.
Baroness Spielman, who led Ofsted from 2017 to 2023, said: “What we haven’t got is a hard enough conception of where labelling is counterproductive, as it almost certainly is for many of the children being given labels.”
She also called for more evidence about the impact of different types of SEND intervention.
“We also need much more hard evidence of the relative and absolute benefits to children from all the myriad kinds of SEND intervention, often very expensive services and support,” she said.
SEND interventions ‘could be doing harm’
Baroness Spielman said that, in the health sector, if a treatment does not have clinical value then it is accepted that it should not be provided at public expense.
“We’re not there yet with SEND interventions, and it’s one of the things that I think is badly needed to help make sure that children do get the support they need, but that we don’t burn through eye-wateringly large budgets on things that actually aren’t helping those children and might even be doing them harm.”
Reacting to Mr Tice’s comments, Joey Nettleton Burrows, policy and public affairs manager at the National Autistic Society, said: “Claiming there is ‘overdiagnosis’ couldn’t be further from the truth.
“The system needs reform to meet the needs of all children, so that SEND children, including autistic young people, can access a suitable school place and thrive.”
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